I'm the lead roboticist. Within bounds, I can answer questions.

It's not exactly the first, this is the first (unclassified, that we know about) satellite to go up and grapple a satellite in geostationary and provide stationkeeping functions for it, which did so back in 2020:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Extension_Vehicle

This is all very novel because in the relatively long history of humans sticking stuff in geostationary orbit, not once until 2020 had any sort of mission gone out to geostationary and intentionally grappled or docked with another satellite.

Woah dual robot arms with tools on it! I have past experience using a CNC machine and I to this day remember how laborious it was to edit g-code and try to fine tune it. I cannot imagine the amount of work it would take to do that for something in space and on a robot arm. That is awesome.

> Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the RSGS payload is designed and developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). The payload is integrated on the Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV) spacecraft, developed by SpaceLogitistics, a Northrop Grumman company, and was launched onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

That's quite a who's who of public-private partnership. It's fascinating to watch these commercial space industries develop in real-time.

A real shame it's not a crewed spacecraft - would be nice to have crewed access to GEO...

Robots get the best jobs...

No mention of OSAM-1, $2 billion NASA mission cancelled due to delays, and likely due to this mission beating it to launch.

wait that reminds me, what happened with the SWIFT rescue attempt recently to lift it into a higher orbit?

* https://science.nasa.gov/mission/swift/swift-boost-mission/

* https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/